April 19, 2009

All through school I would definitely have been part of the inbetweeners – I wasn’t in the popular group, the rugby group, the Goth group or the Indy group – although I don’t want you to think I was a complete loner, introverted as I may have been.

I had a number (which is more than a few but less than a lot) of friends. I guess this could be put down to my complete lack of ball skills, coupled with a memory shorter than Lin Yü-chih (should that comment be considered heightism?) and a horrible inability to construct a sentence in less than five minutes.

Anyway, it did not occur to anyone that I could have been dyslexic. I mean, apart from my social inability which probably had almost little to do with that particular leaning disability, I achieved marks above mediocre (with the exception of P.E.). So for my entire career in compulsory education nothing of dyslexia was ever mentioned – that was just a problem for bottom set kids.

The Problem with Dyslexia

“This video is exactly the sort of thing that makes children with dyslexia believe ‘the end has cometh’, ‘the only thing left to do now is curl up and die’ and ‘why can’t I just be intelligent like all the other kids'” – Mr. Abel

And unfortunately if a child wasn’t in the bottom set originally, you can bet with people like them in the video above the children will end up there soon. Without sounding painfully bitter on this point, having survived school without knowing that I was secretly bearing the label of the dyslexic, probably the worst thing you can do to a child is tell them, “you have a learning disability”.

Although having said that, for me, my father reacted worse… (To Be Continued)